Qubits and Pieces

News from the frontline of the weird and wonderful world of quantum computing.

Lucy Sherriff

<p>Lucy Sherriff is a journalist, science geek and general liker of all things techie and clever. In a previous life she put her physics degree to moderately good use by writing about science for that other tech website, The Register. After a bit of a break, it seemed like a good time to start blogging about weird quantum stuff for ZDNet. And so here we are.
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A Scottish-American collaboration could give quantum cryptography a bandwidth boost, according to Glasgow University.Quantum cryptography works because it is possible to entangle particles, or permanently pair them up so that whatever you do to one, the other instantly exhibits the same properties, The entanglement works no matter how far apart the particles are.

Researchers at Ohio State University have built a plastic computer memory device that stores and reads data using the spin of electrons (spintronics). The team built the device to test a new hybrid organic/magnetic polymer semiconductor material - vanadium tetracyanoethanide.

Researchers at Rice University's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science have successfully created single-atom sheets of an insulator: hexagonal Boron Nitride (h-BN).The breakthrough could help graphene kick silicon back into the 20th century, paving the way for nanoscale field-effect transistors, quantum capacitors or biosensors.

An international team of scientists have succeeded in splitting a single photon into three, beating some seriously long odd in the process. The work could pave the way for three-way quantum communications and according to lead researcher, Associate Professor Thomas Jennewein will "open a new frontier of quantum optics and allow a new class of experiments in quantum computing using photons.

Researchers at the University of Southern California have tipped our friend Graphene as the best material for electrodes in a new design for a flexible organic solar cell. The new design could lead to photovoltaics so flexible they could one day be made into fabric, the researchers say.

Researchers at the Department of Energy in the US think they might have a new insight into how superconductivity breaks down as temperature rises. They hope the discovery could one day lead to superconductivity at – wait for it – room temperature.

It might not be mass production just yet, but researchers at New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have applied some (relatively) low technology to the problem of producing large quantities of graphene.According to Electronics Weekly, the process is simple, doesn't need a controlled environment, and can be done at room temperature.

Graphene, the single layer of carbon atoms that holds so much promise for quantum computing, is useful stuff indeed.Today it emerges that as well as keeping your qubits safe, it can filter arsenic out of your drinking water (although you may want to have a word with your landlord about why there is arsenic in your drinking water to begin with) and it could be used to create real-time DNA readers.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says it has developed a new way of reading data in a quantum computing. This paves the way for a light-matter quantum interface, making for much more efficient quantum data processing.

Firstly, you can relax; this bit of research probably isn't going to totally spoil the potential of quantum computing to provide totally secure cryptography systems. But the scientists behind is say it could lead to better protocols for quantum cryptography in the future.